Typically, users interact with the internet through World Wide Web (WWW) servers and World Wide Web (WWW) pages which offer hypertext capabilities. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is a scripting or programming language which enables the content providers or developers of World Wide Web pages to place hyperlinks within World Wide Web pages which then link to related content or data present in other World Wide Web pages. The content or data present in each web page can be navigated by the end users of World Wide Web using a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
A common task performed by users on the internet is to perform a search function. There are many generalized search engine sites that allow users to perform searches for a large range of topics that may be indexed by those search sites. Examples of generalized search engine sites include Google and Yahoo.
In addition, more specialized internet sites also allow searching to be performed on those sites to allow users to identify content that may be of specific interest to those users. For example, www.youtube.com is an example of a specialized video hosting site that allows users to search the site for videos of interest. Another example of a specialized internet site is www.ebay.com, which is an auction/shopping site that allows users to search the site for products of interest. Yet another example of a specialized site is www.facebook.com, which is a social networking site that allows users to search the site for people, messages, or other social content of interest.
It is often desirable to allow a user to search multiple internet sources at the same time, and to provide an aggregated view of the results to the user. For example, many travel sites allow a user to search for airline tickets or hotel availability from multiple sources/companies, and to display the aggregated results of the search from the different airline companies or hotel chains to the user on an aggregated display.
However, the existing approaches for performing aggregated searches often provide sub-optimal results for the user. One reason is because the searching must occur at a specific internet site that performs such activities, e.g., at the travel web site, the aggregated searching functionality must be supported by that host site, and the results must be presented at that same site. In addition, the specialized site only performs searches for a narrow range of sources that are directly related to the topic specialization of that site, e.g., a travel site only searches underlying sources relating to travel-related topics such as airline tickets and hotel room reservations. The specialized aggregation sites cannot (and are not intended to) provide aggregation of search results from more generalized or different sources.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved approach to allow searching and aggregation of searches on the internet, which allows more flexibility to perform and display search results, and also provides searching for a broad range of secondary search sites.